Wrt the file being opened read/write: if you are rewriting the whole file and it is a large file and the system crashes in the middle, I will argue that the file may be partly rewritten, depending on when the system buffers were last flushed. I don't think the file will remain unchanged until it is properly closed. But I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.

Wrt memory usage: my mistake. The immediate problem I saw with using foreach instead of while is that foreach provides an array context, whereas while provides a scalar context. Therefore, when you use foreach, the <FILE> slurps the entire file at once and creates a list for the foreach to cycle through. Then you are pushing each element into @data, from where I assumed the data would be duplicated. However, reading the foreach documentation, I see the following:

...each element of the list is aliased to the loop variable in turn ... Note that the loop variable becomes a reference to the element itself, rather than a copy of the element.

Therefore you will not be duplicating data. You are reading the whole file in memory only once, not twice as in my original message.

However, I still think reading the whole file in memory is a bad idea, because you will eventually find a file that will not fit in memory. Unless there are other reasons for doing it, I will always prefer to process it one line at a time.

--ZZamboni